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A few steps towards theanthropology of the iconoclastic

gesture

Bruno Latour, CSI, Paris,Science in Context, Vol., 10, n1 pp.63-83, 1998.

Prologue: an exemplary iconoclast

Here is the story of a courageous iconoclast who follows the model of thecritique, his ideal-type.1 His name is Jagannath and he has decided to break the

spell of casts and untouchablity by unveiling to the pariahs that the sacred saligram

of his high-caste family is nothing they should be afraid of. When the pariahs areassembled in the courtyard of his family estate, the well meaning iconoclast, to thehorror of his aunt, seizes the stones and, crossing the forbidden space, carrying theobject to be desecrated by the poor slaves. Suddenly, in the middle of the court, in

the blazing sun, Jagannath hesitates:

Words stuck in his throat. This stone is nothing, but I have set my heart on itand I am reaching it for you: touch it; touch the vulnerable point of my mind;this is the time of everning prayer; touch; the nandadeepa is burning still. Those

standing behind me [the aunt and the priest] are pulling me back by the manybonds of obligation. What are you waiting for? What have I brought? Perhaps

it is like this: this has become a saligram because I have offered it as stone. Ifyou touch it, then it would be a stone for them. This my importunity (sic)becomes a saligram. Because I have given it, because you have touched it, and

because they have all witnessed this event, let this stone change into a saligram,in this darkening nightfall. And let the saligram change into a stone. p.101

But then the pariahs recoil in horror:

Jagannaht tried to soothe them. He said in his everyday tone of a teacher:This is mere stone. Touch it and you will see. If you dont, you will remainfoolish forever.

He did not know what had happened to them, but found the entire grouprecoiling suddenly. They winced under their wry faces, afraid to stand and


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Contemporary Models of the Critique 2

afraid to run away. He had desired and languished for this auspicious moment

this moment of the pariahs touching the image of God. He spoke in a voicechoking with great rage: Yes, touch it!He advance towards them. They shrank back. Some monstruous cruelty

overtook the man in him. The pariahs looked like disgusting creaturescrawling upon their bellies.

He bit his underlip and said in a firm low voice: Pilla, touch it! Yes, touch it!.Pilla [a pariah foreman] stood blinking. Jagannath felt spent and lost.Whatever he had been teaching them all these days had gone to waste. Herattled dreadfully: Touch, touch, you TOUCH IT! It was like the sound ofsome infuriated animal and it came tearing through him. He was sheer

violence itself; he was conscious of nothing else. The pariahs found him moremenacing than Bhutaraya [the demon-spirit of the local god]. The air wasrent with his screams. Touch, touch, touch. The strain was too much forthe pariahs. Mechanically they came forward, just touched what Jagannathwas holding out to them, and immediately withdrew.

Exhausted by violence and distress Jagannath pitched aside the saligram. Aheaving anguish had come to a grotesque end. Aunt could be human evenwhen she treated the pariahs as untouchables. He had lost his humanity for amoment. The pariahs had been meaningless things to him. He hung his head.He did not know when the pariahs had gone. Darkness had fallen when he

came to know that he was all by himself. Disgusted with his own person hebegan to walk about. He asked himself: when they touched it, we lost outhumanity they and me, didnt we? And we died. Where is the flaw of it all,in me or in society? There was no answer. After a long walk he came home,

feeling dazed.

Fetishes+Facts=Factishes

We tend to take iconoclasm for a critical virtue which plays in politics,philosophy and the arts the role of the Sovereign Good, the role of what cannotpossibly be discussed. What I want to do in this paper is to interrogate the wisdomof this position, not by breaking it apart -which would simply add another

iconoclastic gesture to the long list of such endeavours- but by suspending thegesture and to explore its meaning, exactly as Jagannath and the novelist do. Mycontention is that we have used up the repertoire of critical methods available to

us and that it is now time to retrace our steps. It seems that belief after belief, thecritique has eaten up everything it could, including science and rationality. Hence

the theme of this special issue.So many things have been criticized, so many beliefs debunked, that some

critical thinkers believe they have entered the postmodern realm of virtuality.Forgetting the cost, difficulty and technical know-how, necessary to produce any

virtual image, postmodern critiques have built the final hall of mirrors of beliefs

and make-believe. Only they, however, live in virtual reality. The rest of us, likethe aunt and the pariahs of the anecdote above, live in another non-modern worldfrom which belief is absent and hence the modernist critique and thepostmodern virtuality.

Another way of saying this, is to point out that in all their efforts at critique,

the modernist and postmodernist have left belief untouched, the only real


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untouchable of their courageous enterprises. They believe in belief. They believe

that people naively believe. I will call agnosticism, not the doubt exerted on values,powers, ideas, truths, distinctions, constructions, but, on the contrary, the doubtexerted against this doubt itself, against the notion that belief could account in any

way for what holds any of these forms of life together. If we do away with belief (inbeliefs) then we can explore other models of critique, at least this is the argument I

propose to discuss in this issue, the purpose of which, if I have understood itcorrectly, is to explore other ressources than the critique to provide politicalleverage.

I will proceed in two moves. The first will delicately surround the criticalmodel to turn it into a topic for enquiry, an interesting but now innocuous

repertoire. The second, will, on the contrary, reactivate what the critique hadmade us blind to, thus offering to politics other models, that have always beenpresent, but had become hard to hear and see. The tone of my article will not beanalytical because I take analytical gestures -like those of deconstruction- to be like

very fine and delicate iconoclastic gestures exerted not on idols and images but on

fragments of fragments so small then end up in dust. I will use for this piece adifferent tone, a sort of elegiatic one, since my aim here is simply to give space toa new figure of speech that I will call the factish, and that should allow me to openanother language possibility where the question of constructivism or realism couldbe shortcut.

Before seeing what a non-critical, non-denunciatory, non-modern politicalfight would be, we have to rewind part of the tape and to understand how thecritique ticks, so to speak, now that we can observe it as a sort of museum piecethat has lost its activity, its activism, as have initiation masks in ethnography

museums.Iconoclasm, is an essential part of what it means to be a critique. But what isbeing broken by the hammer? An idol. A fetish. What is a fetish? Something thatis nothing in itself, but only the screen on which we have projected, by mistake,our fancies, our labor, hopes and passions. A mere stone as Jagannath tries toconvince himself and the pariahs. The difficulty, of course, is that it is hard to

explain how a fetish could be at once everything the source of all energy for thebelievers, nothing a simple piece of wood or a stone and a little bit ofsomething what is able to reverse the origin of action and to make one believethat the maker is actually, through inversion, reification, objectification, made bythe workings of ones own hands. Somehow fetishes gain importance in the hands

of the anti-fetishists. The more you want it to be nothing, the more action springsback from it. Hence the worry of the well-meaning iconoclast: This has become asaligram because I have offered it as a stone. As Michel Serres has beautifullyshown, it is hard to pin point the exact difference between the hammer of asculptor and the hammer of an iconoclast.2

What has been broken by the courageous iconoclasts? I contend that it is notthe fetish, but that what has been broken is a way of arguing and acting that usedto render action and argument possible? (When they touched, we lost ourhumanity they and me; didnt we? And we died). This is always the difficultywith anti-fetichism. It is an accusation. An accusation levelled at some persons

accused of being taken in or worse of cynically manipulating credulous

believers by someone who is sure of escaping from this illusion and wants to freethe others as well either from nave belief or from being manipulative. But if


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anti-fetishism is clearly an accusation, it is not a description of what happens to

those who believe or are manipulated. Actually, as is beautifully illustrated byJagannaths move, it is the critical thinker who invents the notion of belief andmanipulation projected upon a situation where the fetish plays an entirely different

role. Neither the aunt nor the priest ever considered the saligram as any thing otherthan a mere stone, never. By making it what should be touched by the pariahs,

Jagannanth transubstantiates the stone into a monstruous thing andtransubstantiates Jagannanth himself in a cruel animal, while the pariahs aretransmigrated into crawling beasts and mere things. What horrifies thenatives in the iconoclastic move is not the gesture itself that would break theiridols, but the extravagant belief that the iconoclast wishes to impute to them. How

could the iconoclast demean himself to the point of believing that we, the natives,would so naively believe or so cynically manipulate, or so stupidly dupeourselves? Are we animals? Are we monsters? Are we mere things?

The hammer strikes sideway something else than that which the iconoclastwanted to break. Instead of freeing the pariahs from their abject condition,

Jagannath breaks his and their humanity, and that of his aunt. Somehow,humanity was depending upon the presence of those mere stones. Iconoclasmdoes not break an idol but a way of arguing and acting that is anathema to theiconoclast. The only one who is projecting feelings onto the idol, is him, theiconoclast with a hammer, not those who should be freed, by his gesture, from

their shackles. The only one who believes is him, the fighter of all beliefs. Why?Because he (I use a masculine marker and that serves him right!) believes in belief,a very strange feeling indeed, a feeling that might have no correspondence in anysituation whatsoever. Belief, nave belief, might be the way for the iconoclast to

enter into contact, violent contact, with the others. Not a state of mind, not a wayto grasp statements, but a mode of relations. It is only when the statue is hit by theviolent shock of the iconoclasts hammer, that it becomes a potential idol, naivelyand wrongly endowed with powers that it does not possess the proof being thatit now lies in pieces and nothing happens, except the indignant puzzlement of theones who had loved the statue, have been accused of being taken in by its power,

and now remain liberated from its sway (but as we see in the Indian novel, whatnow lies in waste in the middle of the destructed family temple is the humanity ofthe icon-breaker).

Before being hit, the idol was something else, not a stone mistakenly takenfor a spirit, or any such thing. What was it? Can we retrieve a meaning that would

bring the broken pieces together, as if we could, like archaeologists, repair thedamages of time, that greatest of all iconoclasts? We can in part by extracting thetwo broken halves of the words fetish and fact. The fetish is what is fabricatedand what is not fabricated.3 The fact is what is fabricated and not fabricated.4There is nothing hidden in this joint articulation. Everyone says it explicitely,

constantly, obsessively, the scientists through their laboratory practice, the adeptsof fetishist cults through their rites. Except that we use these words after thehammer has broken them into two: the fetish has become nothing but an emptystone on which meaning is mistakenly projected; the fact has become an absolutecertainty which can be used as a hammer to break away all the delusions of beliefs.

Now, let us try to glue together again the two broken symbols and thus

restitute the four quarters of our new repertoire.5 The fact that is used as a solidhammer, is also fabricated, in the laboratory, through a long and complex


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negotiation. Does this addition of its second half, its hidden history, its laboratory

setting, weaken the fact? Yes, because it is no longer solid and sturdy like ahammer. It is now, so to speak, filamentous, more fragile, more complex, richly

vascularized. It can still be used, to be sure, but not by an iconoclast and not to

shatter down a belief. A somewhat subtler hand is required to seize this quasi-object and a somewhat different program of action should be implemented with it.

What about the other side? What happens to the fetish? It is said, quiteclearly to be fabricated, made, invented, devised.6 No one of its practictionersseems to need the belief in belief to account for its efficacy. Everyone seems to spellout quite frankly how it is made. Does the acknowledgement of this fabricationweaken in any way the claim that it is acting? Yes, because it is no longer a

ventriloquous phenomenon, an inversion, a reification, an echo, whereby themaker would be taken in by what it has just created.7 It is no longer a naive beliefin a retroprojection of human labor onto an object that is nothing in itself. It is notbreakable and fragile like a belief waiting for the iconoclasts hammer. It is nowmore sturdy, much more reflexive, richly endowed with a collective practice,

reticulated like blood vessels. Reality but no longer belief is entangled in it. If thehammer was still threatening it into destruction, it would bounce back on thisplastic and resilient network.

If we add to the facts their fabrication in the laboratory, and if we add to thefetishes their explicit and reflexive fabrication by their makers, the two main

ressources of the critique disappear, the hammer as well as the anvil I did notsay the hammer and the sickle!8 What appears in their stead, is what had beenbroken by iconoclasm, what had always been there, what has always to be carvedanew, what is necessarily present for acting and arguing, and that I will call

factish. The factish is what is retrieved from the massacre of facts and fetishes,when the actions of their makers are explicitely recovered for both. The symmetryof the two broken symbols is put back into place. If the iconoclast could naivelybelieve that there exist believers naive enough to endow a stone with spirit, it wasbecause the iconoclast also naively believed that the very facts he was using toshatter the idol were themselves produced without the help of any human agency.

But it human agencies are brought back in both cases, the belief to be shattereddisappears with the shattering fact.9 We enter a world we had never left, except indreams, the dreams of reason, a world where arguments and actions areeverywhere facilitated, permitted, protected, allowed, afforded by factishes10.

The notion of factish is not an analytical category that could be added to the

others through a clear and crisp discourse, since the clarity of discourse is obtainedby provoking the deepest obscurity, that is a choice between constructivism andreality Are scientific facts real or are they constructed? Are fetishes beliefsprojected on idols or are these idols really acting? Although these questions arecommonsense enough and seem necessary for any analytical clarity to take over,

they are, in my view, what render all the associations of humans and non-humanstotally opaque If there is one thing that does not clarify the saligrams function it isto ask whether or not it is a mere stone or a powerful object or a socialconstruct. But there is a difficulty in saying that one does not answer the question:is it real or is it constructed? Because the refusal to answer, can be confused with a

cynical acceptation of the falsity of all constructs. The solution of the factish is not

to ignore the choice as so many postmoderns will do by saying yes of course,construction and reality are the same thing; everything, we know that, is illusion


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and make believe11. The factish says something else: it is because it is constructed

that it is so exactly real, so autonomous, so independant of our own hands. As longas we dont understand the synonymy between construction and autonomousreality, we misconstrue the factishes as another sort of social constructivism and

not as what modifies the theory of what it is to construct anything12.

The model of the critique

The breaking of factishes into facts and fetishes, had an enormous effect on

the model of the critique. It is at the origin of this source of analytical clarity thathas done so much to obscure the debates in science studies, that is the distinctionbetween epistemological questions and ontological questions, between mentalrepresentations and things themselves, between subjects and objects. If there is nofactish but only fetishes which are, in this definition, nothing but pieces of wood

and mute stones, where are we to locate all the things that believers believe in?

There is no other solution than to push them into the mind of believers or theirfecund imagination, or even further down into their rather perverse and crookedunconscious.

Why not let them reside where they were, that is in the many intermediary

worlds? Because the world itself has been filled beyond capacity by thesimultaneous other move that has transformed factishes into facts. If no humanagency is at work or has been at work in the manufacture of facts, if there isno limit of cost, information, network, manpower to produce, expand andmaintain them, then nothing, absolutely nothing stops the facts from proliferating

everywhere, filling in a continuous voidless fashion every little corner of the worldand also unifying the worlds into one single homogeneous world. The notion of

matter, of a mechanical universe, of a mechanical world-picture, of a naturalworld, are simple consequences of the breaking away of the two meanings of facts:what is being fabricated, what is not fabricated. But on the other hand, the notions

of a belief, of a mind, of interior representations, of illusions, are nothing but theconsequence of having shattered the fetish into two halves: what is fabricated,what is not fabricated.

It is hard to decide what has come first. Has the notion of an interior mindbeen invented to find a repository for all the entities squeezed out of the world, or,

on the contrary, did the belief in beliefs empty the world so that there was room toallow factoids to proliferate like rabbits in Australia? What is sure is that, bybreaking the ways of arguing and acting through factishes, by removing the

human agencies from the fabrication of facts and from the fabrication of fetishes,two fabulous reservoirs have been invented, one for epistemology, one for

ontology. The subjects with an inside are as strange as the objects with an outside.Indeed, the notion of an inside and an outside are very queer and is, in its ownrespect, a fabulous innovation. With one stroke, the iconoclast is now able to startthe most powerful suction- and force-pump ever devised. Whenever entities areobstacles to his action they can be sucked out of existence into beliefs.13 Whenever

there is a deficit of mechanical entities that render his action unsteady orobjectionable, they can be forced-pumped into existence by the thousands.

There is of course a difficulty in talking as if only the iconoclast was a naivebeliever, as if only he and he alone was projecting feelings onto objects andforgetting that the facts he was making in the laboratory have no maker. How

could he, and he alone, be naive, and immersed in bad faith and false


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consciousness? Is there not a lack of charity here; worse a lack of reflexivity; even

worse, a lack of symmetry? It is true that the modernist iconoclast does not believemore naively in his double construction of facts and fetishes than any of the otherbelieved in the idols he destroyed to free them from their chains. Something else

is at stake in his obsession, another wisdom, which, to be sure, is not that of thefactishes, but is a wisdom all the same, no matter how tortuous it will appear to be.

Let us consider one last time the extraordinary power of the modernist iconoclast,when he is not self-conscious, that is before he stops being modern, when he stillresides in his pristine and unspoiled exoticism!

We see why we cannot be naive enough in attributing naive belief in anti-fetichism to the iconoclast. It is, on the contrary, a very precise mechanism that

allows, by removing human agency twice, an extraordinary degree of freedomsince, at no cost, it is possible to free the passage for action by disintegratingentities into mere beliefs and solidifying opinions and positions into hard facts. Noone ever had so much freedom. Freedom, is precisely what triggers and justifiesthe iconoclasts strokes. But freedom from what? Freedom from caution and care

(see the next section), not from factishes because the iconoclast is not of course freenot to have human agency manufacturing facts in the laboratory, nor is he free toconfine entities in internal states of a mind endowed with an imagination and adeep unconscious. On that score, modernists are like everyone else and there isonly one non-modern humanity. Factishes are necessary everywhere to every one.

But the main advantage of the critical modernist is to be able to use at once thetwo sets of resources, the one of the factishes, like everyone else, and the ones,apparently contradictory, that radically distinguish facts that no one hasmade from fetishes which are totally non-existing objects, just beliefs and

internal representations. This is what gives the modernist his uniqueanthropological peculiarity, what allows comparative anthropology to recognizethat culture among all the others14.

Let us very quickly tick the items off this check list.Modernists are iconoclasts, they have all the rage and violence and power

that allows to break the factishes and allows for the production of two

irreconciliable ennemies: fetishes and facts.15Modernists are freed, by this very shattering act, from the chains that bind

all the other cultures, since they can, at will, pump out of existence whateverentities limit their action, and pump into existence whichever entitie enhance oraccelerate their action (at least, this is the way they understand the other

cultures to be as if those were blocked, or limited, or paralyzed).Modernists, protected by this iconoclasm, can then proceed, like everyone

else, to produce, inside the insulated womb of their laboratories as manyfactishes as they want. To them even the sky is not a limit. Hybrids can be triedout endlessly since there are no consequences attached to them. The inventiveness,

originality, juvenile ardor of the moderns can go on unfettered. It is onlypractice, they can say, it has no consequence, theory will remain safe for ever.16Modernists behave like the Carthaginese saying of their own children sacrificed toBaal they are only calves, only calves, not children!17

Above them, watching them like protective goddesses, the clear-cut

distinction of subject and object, science and politics, facts and fetishes, render for

ever invisible their complicated and rather bizarre mixing up of all of them.Above, subject and objects are infinitely distant especially in science. Below,


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subjects and objects are intermingled to the most extreme, especially in science

making. Above, facts and values are infinitely distant. Below they are confused andredistributed and tossed around endlessly. Above science and politics never mix.Below, they are remade anew from top to bottom.

Notice the construction that makes factishes thrice invisible: above they havedisappeared to be replaced by a clear and radiant theory that in order to be lit

requires that a complete and constant distinction be made between fact andfiction; below, the factishes are there how could they not be? but they arehidden, invisible, mute, since only the silent and babbling practice can account forwhat is stricly forbidden above. To be sure, actors constantly speak about that,but in a shattered and hesitant language that only field work can retrieve and that

never threatens the opposite discourse of theory. Finally, an absolute distinctionkeep separate the top of the set up from the bottom part. Of course the factish ofthe modern exists, but their construction is so strange, that they are everywhereactive, visible to the naked eyes, and yet invisible and impossible to register.

Naturally, the moderns, are conscious, reflexive and explicit about this three

fold construction. If they were not, we would have to believe in a conspiracy, tobelieve in belief, to believe in illusio and to deny to the moderns, and only to them,the right of being like everyone else, that is freed from belief and in the solid handsof factishes. How do we know that the moderns know they have never beenmodern? Because, far from only keeping separate the facts from the fiction in

the top half of their construction and the theory of the separation from thepractice of mediation the bottom half, they endlessly, obsessively, fix up,repair, overcome, those broken fragments. Everything at hand is used to show thatsubjects and objects should be reconciled, patched up, overtaken, aufhebunged.

Modernism never stops fixing and repairing, and patching up again and beingdesperate about not being able to fix it because, with all this repair work,modernists never abandon the shattering gesture that began all of it and thatcreated modernity in the first place. So desperate are they that, after havingshattered all the other cultures, they start to envy them and to devise, under thename of exotism, the museographic cult of the whole, complete, organic,

wholesome, unspoiled, untouched, unmodernised savage! To the modern, theyadd an even queerer invention, the premodern.

So we can sketch the psycho-social ideal-type of the modern, the model ofcritique. Iconoclast, it breaks the idols, all of them, always, fiercely. Then,protected by this gesture, in the silent practice liberated for him like a huge

underground cavity, it can have a go, with all the juvenile ardor of invention, atmixing up all sorts of hybrids without fearing any of the consequences. No fear, nopast, only what can be tried. But then, terrified by the sudden realization of theconsequences how could a fact be just a fact with no history, no past and noconsequence, a bald fact instead of a hairy one? they suddenly shift from

brave inconoclasm, and juvenile ardor, to guilt ridden bad consciousness and thistime they destroy themselves, in endless ceremonies of atonement, lookingeverywhere for the broken fragments of their creative destruction, fixing them upin huge and fragile bundles.

What is the most strange is that these godless, fetish-less creatures, are

viewed by all the others, as possessing terrifying protectors and gods!18 And the

other cultures do not know when they are more terrifying: is it when they breakdown the idols and burn them in autodafs? When they innovate freely down in


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their laboratories without the slightest worry for the consequences? Or, when they

go around beating their chest and tearing their hair out, desperate at the sins theyhave committed and wanting to recover everywhere in their museums thewholesomeness of the lost paradises?

Yes indeed, the moderns are interesting characters, worth the attention ofcomparative anthropologists!

Other models than the model of the critique

Now that we have turned the modernist repertoire from a resource to atopic, and that we have portrayed the guilt-ridden iconoclast as one interesting butpeculiar trait of one culture among others, is it possible to imagine a model fordoing politics that would not rely so heavily on the model of the critique? This isan extraordinarilly difficult question because the scenography of the Left has been

so powerfully influence by iconoclasm that it seems that if you do away with it, you

immediately fall into one of the very few models of reactionary politics. How canthe number of models be multiplied and the definitions of reaction and fall bemodified? One way is to deeply modify the scenography of politics itself19. Thetask is of course beyond my ability, but I just want to explore a bit further the

wisdom of the factishes. If we were living under their protection again and nolonger in between facts and fetishes at least three things would be deeplydifferent: the definition of action and mastery; the definition of agency and of theirtypes of ontology; the definition of care and caution and the public institutions toexhibit them.

a- action and mastery

What has been broken by iconoclasm that can be retrieved by factishes? Acertain theory of action and of mastery. Once the hammer has shattered facts andfetishes, the dual question is raised and nothing can stop it: did you do the

construction yourself, or is the thing you constructed autonomous? This endless,sterile and boring question, has paralyzed the field of science studies centuriesbefore it even started: when a fact is fabricated, who is doing the fabrication? Thescientist? The thing? If you answer the thing, then you are an outdated realist. If

you answer the scientist, then you are a bloody constructivist. If you answer

both, then you do one of those repair jobs known as dialectics that patch up thedichotomy, hiding it even deeper and further by turning it into a contradictionthat has to be resolved and overcome. And yet, it is both, obviously, but without

the mastery that seems to go with the realist or the relativist answer or a clevermixture of both. Laboratory scientists make autonomous facts.20 That we have to

hesitate between two versions of this simple make do (fait-faire), proves that wehave been hit by a hammer that has broken in two parts the simple andstraightforward factish. The shock of critical intelligence has rendered us stupid.

What if we listened exactly to what is said by practicing scientists withoutadding or withdrawing any thing? The scientist manufactures a fact, but of course,

when we manufacture something, we are not in command, we are slightlyovertaken by the action, every builder knows that. Thus the paradox ofconstructivism is that it uses a vocabulary of mastery that no architect, mason, cityplanner or carpenter would ever use. Are we taken in by what we do? Are we

seized, possessed, alienated? No, not always, not quite. What slightly overtakes usis also, because of our own agency, because of the clinamen of our own action,


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slightly overtaken, modified. Are we just restating dialectics? No, there is no

object, no subject, no contradiction, no aufhebung, no mastery, no recapitulation,no spirit, no alienation. But there are events. I never act, I am surprised by what Ido. What is acting through me, is also surprised by what I do, by the occasion

offered to mutate, and to change, and to bifurcate, that is offered, by me and thecircumstances surrounding me, to what has been invited, recovered, welcomed.21

Action is not a story of mastery, of hammer and shatters, but of bifurcation,event, circumstances. Of course, this is difficult to retrieve once iconoclasm hasstruck, because facts and tools are now firmly in place, offering a model for Homo

faberthat can never, after that, be displaced and reformatted. But, no human agenthas ever built, constructed, fabricated any thing, not even a stone tool, not even a

basket, not even a bow, with the repertoire of action invented forHomo faber.Homofaber is a Homo fable through and through, a restrospective projection into ourfantastic past of a definition of matter, humanity, mastery and agency which datesentirely from the modernist period, and which uses only a quarter of its repertoire

the non-human material world.22 So we cannot account for laboratory practice

by falling onto a modernist definition of construction or, even worse, of socialconstruction!

Why is it so difficult to retrieve other theories of action? Because it iscrucially important to the modernist ethos to have to choose between what youfabricate meaning a free and naked human and what is a fact out there that

no one has ever fabricated. The whole work of the modern has been to make thosetwo extreme agents unfit for any other role than opposing one another. Nowonder they cannot be used for anything else! It is a simple question ofergonomics: they cannot be handled for a different job. But of course, the idiom

change immediately, when the two halves of facts are brought together again.Facts are facts, that is fait-faire. Of course the scientist does not make up facts who has ever made up anything? this is another fable, symmetric with theHomo

faberone and that deals, this time, with the fancies of the mind. But it is seized,modified, altered, possessed by non-humans which alters, at the occasion of thescientistss work, their trajectory, destiny, history. Only modernists believe that the

only choice given is to be a free Sartrian agent or a thing out there. Every scientistknow that things have a history too and that Newton happens to gravity and thatPasteur happens to the microbes. Intermingle, bifurcate, happen,concresce, commerce, negotiate, ally, be the circumstances of, such aresome of the verbs that can account for the shift in attention from the modernist to

the non-modernist idiom.What is at stake here of course is mastery. In the fanciful description of a

construction, modernists believe that they will be made in the image of God. Thisis a strange and rather impious definition of God. As if God was master of Hiscreation! as if He was omnipotent and omniscient! But if He had all of these

perfections, there would be no Creation.23 God, too is slighlty overtaken by HisCreation, that is, by what is changed and modified and altered in encounteringHim. Yes, we are indeed made in the image of God, that is, we do not know eitherwhat we are doing. We are surprised even when we have, when we believe wehave, complete mastery. Even a software programmer is surprised by her creation

after two thousand lines of software; should God not be surprised after a much

longer package? Who has ever mastered an action? Show me a novelist, a painter,


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an architect, a cook, who has not, like God, been surprised, overcome, ravished by

what she was that they were no longer doing.And do not tell me that they were possessed, alienated, dominated by

other outside forces. They never exactly say so. They say that these others have

been modified, altered, ravished, at the occasion of the action, in thecircumstances of the event. Mastery, domination, recapitulation, are not what is at

stake. No non-modern wants to have to deal with that sort of God or that sort ofMan. Factishes have a quite different definition of God, of human agencies, ofaction, of non-humans. No model of political action will be offered as alternativeto the critique before we can modify the anthropology of them all, that is beforewe retrieve the anthropology practiced by the modernists even during the time

they believed themselves to be modern.

b- entities with different ontological specifications

The iconoclast, as we have seen, triggers into existence the most powerful

sucking and forcing-pump ever devised, able to empty the world of all itsinhabitants by turning them into representations and filling it in with continuousmechanical matter. What happens when this pump itself has stalled, when there isno longer an inside mind into which one can squeeze, under the name of fancy orbelief, every entity and when there is no longer an outside world made ofahistorical, ahuman, out there causes? The difference between inside and

outside is the first to go, naturally. It does not mean that everything is outside, butsimply that the whole scenography of outside and inside has dissipated away.

What appears in its place is, at first, a bewildering array of entities, divinities,angels, goddesses, magic mountains, characters, controversies about facts,statements in all stages of construction. The scene might be so filled with such an

heterogeneous crowd that one might start worrying and miss the modernist time,when the pump was at work sucking out of existence all of the beliefs andreplacing them all with sure and safe and certain objects of nature. But fortunatelythese entities do not request the same ontological specifications. They cannot beordered, to be sure, into beliefs and realities, but they can be ordered, and very

neatly, according to their types of claim to existence.Jagannaths stone, for instance, does not claim to be a spirit as in the fetishist

mode, nor of course does it claim to be the symbol of a spirit projected unto thestone as in the antifetichist version.24 As Jagannath realizes clearly when failing todesecrate the stone, it is what makes them human, what holds them in existence,

that without which they would die. Of course, understood in the fact/fetishdichotomy, the stone immediately becomes a spirit, that is a transcendantal entitythat obeys the same specification as an object of nature except that it is invisible.25In practice, however, the stone is a factish and does not request to be a spirit, norto be invisible, it never fails to remain, even for the aunt and for the priest, a

mere stone. It simply requests to be what protects humans against inhumanityand death, what, when removed, turns them into monsters, animals, things.

The problem is that this way of arguing granting ontology back to the verycontent of beliefs runs against the whole deontology of the social sciences.When the sage points to the Moon, says the Chinese proverb, the fool looks at his

fingertip. Well, we have all educated ourselves to be fools! This is our deontology.

This is what a social scientist learns at school, mocking the unwashed who naivelybelieve in the Moon. We know that when actors speak about the Virgin Mary,


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divinities, saligram, UFOs, black holes, virus, genes, sexuality, etc. we should not

look at the things thus designated who should be so naive nowadays? but lookinstead at the finger, and from there, following along the arm through the nervefibers, to the mind of the believer, and from there, down the spinal chord to the

social structures, to the cultural systems, to the discursivities, or to the evolutionarybases that make possible such beliefs. So strong is the anti-fetishist bias that it

seems impossible to argue the opposite without hearing the indignant screams:realism! religiosity! spiritism! reaction!. We should imagine now a scene thatwould play Jannagaths trauma in reverse: the non-modern thinker wants to touchthe objects of beliefs again, and the modernist and postmodernist critiques, horrorstricken, scream at them dont touch them!! dont touch them! Anathema!26.

And yet, we, the science students, have touched them, and nothing happenedexcept that the dreams of social constructivism disappeared!

After centuries of detachment, the focus of attention is now turning back tothe fingertip and from it to the Moon. The simplest explanation for all theattitudes of humanity since the dawn of its existence, is probably that people mean

what they say, and when they designate an object this object is the cause of theirbehavior and not a delusion to be explained by a mental state.27 Here again weshould understand that the situation is entirely different since the advent of sciencestudies. To be anti-fetishist was feasible when facts could be used as destructiveweapons against beliefs. But if we are now talking of factishes, there exist neither

beliefs (to be fostered or destroyed) nor facts (to be used as hammer). The situationis much more interesting. We are faced with many different practical metaphysics,practical ontologies.28

By granting ontology back to the non-human entities, we can start to tackle

the major difficulty of the model of critique, I mean its lack of public support.29

The modernist Enlightnenment, in its republican ideal at least, became, for awhile, a popular movement. It stuck a chord in all of the oppressed around theworld. By accommodating facts into our collective existence, masses of delusion,oppression, manipulation, went away. But since then, the models of the critiquehave ceased to be popular. They now run against the very grain of what it is to be

human and to believe. Facts have overdone it, transforming everything else intobeliefs. The burden of supporting all these beliefs become unbearable when, as inthe postmodern predicament, science itself has been submitted to the same doubt.It is one thing to attack beliefs by believing in science. But what is one supposed todo when science itself is transformed into belief? The only solution is postmodern

virtuality, a low point in politics, aesthetics and metaphysics. The engine ofvirtuality however is in postmodern heads, not in the worlds surrounding them.Virtuality is what everything else becomes when belief in belief has run amock.Time to stop the little salt-mill grinding, before every thing else has become bitter.

Cound we not say, quite simply, that people are tired of being accused of

believing in non-existing things, Allah, djinns, angels, Mary, Gaia, gluons,retroviruses, rock, televisions, laws, and so on?30 The non-modern intellectual isnot in Jagannaths posture, bringing day after day new saligram to desecrate, andthen throwing them aside, discouraged at discovering that only he, the desecrator,the iconoclast, the liberator, believes in those and that everyone else ordinary

pariahs, average laboratory scientists has always lived under a completely

different definition of action under factishes of totally different shapes andfunctions.... Thus, maybe it is that new models for politics can no longer find use


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in the critique. The diplomacy of existing entities is now what should be argued

for.31

c- care and caution

What was the factish doing best before it got broken by the anti-fetichiststrike? To say that it mediated action between construction and autonomy is anunderstatement and depends too much on the ambiguous definition of mediation.

Action is not what someone does, but the fait-faire, the make-do, by others in anevent, at the occasion of circumstances. These others are not ideas, nor things, butnon-human entities which have their own ontological specifications and populate,through their complex gradients, a world that resembles neither the mental worldof psychologists nor the physical world of epistemologists, although it is as strange

as the first and as real as the second.What the factishes were good at was to articulate caution and publicity.

They were publically declaring that care should be exerted in the manipulation of

hybrids. When they break the fetishes, the iconoclasts break the factishes instead.Of course, this is what gives the modernists this fabulous energy, invention,creativity. They are no longer held by any constraint, any responsibility. Thebroken halves of the fetish, on top of the modernist temple, protect them againstany moral implication of what they do, down below, and they are all the moreinventive since they are wallowing in mere practice. Then, what has been

removed by the hammer is care and caution. Of course, action has consequencesbut those come later, litterally after the fact, and under the subservient guise ofunexpected consequences, of belated impact.32 Modernist objects are bald aesthetically, morally, epistemologically, but the ones produced by the non-moderns have always been dischevelled, networky, rhyzomelike.33 The reason why

one should always beware with factishes is that the consequences are unseen, themoral order fragile, the social one unstable. This is just what happen withmodernist facts, except that consequences are an after-thought.34 It is only afterthe desecrating ceremony that Jagannath realizes that no one ever believed thesaligram not to be a stone and that the only one who produced inhumanity through

this destruction of the idol, was he, the free thinker. When the aunt and the priestwere screaming beware!, beware!, they did not mean, as he thought, that theywere afraid of him breaking the taboo, but that they were afraid of him breakingthe factish that keep care and caution under attentive public consideration.35

How sad to realize that the iconoclasts hammer strikes always missed their

target. How strange is it to write this for a symposium in Jerusalem a city whichhas been built on the sudden suspension by an Angel of a sacrificial gesture! Arewe not the descendants of all the iconoclastic gestures of our history? Of Mosesstriking down the Golden Calf? Of Paul breaking down the pagan idols? Of theLutherans sorting out what should and what should not be painted?36 Of Galileo

shattering the antique cosmos? Of the revolutionaries breaking down the AncienRegime? Of Nietzsche, the philosopher with a hammer, breaking down every idol,or, more accurately, hitting them gently to hear how hollow they sound underinspection? To believe the opposite, to denounce this pedigree, this prestigiousgenealogy, would be, to be sure, to accept the grave accusation of becoming

reactionary, archaic, pagan even. How could this absurd position lead to another

model for politics?


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First, paganism, archaism and reaction are dangerous but only when

used as foils for modernization. There is, as we learned from anthropology, nosuch a thing as an archaic primitive culture to which one could go back. This hasalways been an exotic fantasy of reactionary racism. Same thing for paganism.

Same thing for reactionary politics, itself an invention of modernizers.Reactionary is a dangerous and unstable word, but it might be construed as

what simply means bringing care and caution back into the fabrication of facts andto make the salutary beware! heard again in the depth of the laboratories oursincluded.

Second, becoming again non-modern necessarily implies a reworking of ourgenealogy and of our ancestry. The fight against idolatry might have been all

along a misplaced target for monotheism.37 The fight against icons a misplacedfight for Byzantine orthodoxy38. The fight against catholic piety is probably amisplaced target of Protestant Reformation. The fight against irrationalism, amisplaced target for science. The fight against realism, a misplaced targed forsocial construction. The fight against divinity, a misplaced target for psychiatry.

Each time, the misinterpretation is the same: the naive belief in the otherss naivebelief. The modernists always have difficulties in understanding themselvesbecause of their iconoclasm and because of the indefinite worries they have ofhaving been iconoclasts. To study iconoclasm as part of their anthropology, oftheir psycho-social ideal-type necessarily modifies its effect and its impact. The

knife no longer has a cutting edge, the hammer is too heavy. And yet, it isnecessary to think about it, since the alternative is no longer viable: we will notmodernize the world, we meaning the tiny number of non-believers at the tipof the Western peninsula.

Third and more importantly, politics has always also been about things.39

Toreuse Isabelle Stengers beautiful title, what has been into question has alwaysbeen cosmopolitics. It is only through an extraordinary shrinking of its meaningthat politics has been limited to values, interests, opinions, and forces of isolated,naked, humans. The great interest of letting facts merge back into their dishevellednetworks and controversies, and letting beliefs regain their ontological weight, is

that politics becomes what it always was anthropologically: the management,diplomacy, combination, negotiation of human and non-human agencies. Who orwhat can withstand whom or what? Thus another political model is offered, notone that will add a supplement of soul, or that will ask citizens to adjust facts totheir values, or that will drag us back to the village assembly, but one that will

entertain as many practical ontologies as there are factishes. The role of theintellectual is not then to have a hammer in hand and to break beliefs with facts,40but to be factishes maybe also facetious themselves , that is to keep thediversity of ontological status against their transformation into facts and fetishes,beliefs and things. No one requests Jagannath to be content with his high-caste

rank and to maintain the status quo. But no one asks him either to debunk thesacred family stones or to set the others free41. In the long history of the models ofcritique, we underestimated what freedom meant, when you add human agencytwice to the fabrication of fetishes and to that of facts. We seem to have missedsomething along the way. It might be time to retrace our steps, the risk of being

reactionary might be smaller than that of being modernist at the wrong time and

in the wrong fashion.


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In the Tel-Aviv Diaspora Museum one can see a medieval manuscript where

Abraham gesture interrupted by the hand of God is aiming at a little Isaac on apedestal that strikingly resembles an idol about to be broken. This bloodiest of allcity is funded on an interrupted human sacrifice. Is not one of the many causes of

this bloodshed the strange contradiction there is in suspending human sacrificeswhile carrying out with glee the destruction of idols? Should we not abstain from

that destruction of humanity too? Whose hand should stop us before the criticalgesture is carried out? Where is the ram that could be used as a substitute for thecritical mode of reasoning? If it is true that we are all descendants of thatAbrahams suspended knife, what sort of people will we form when we also abstainfrom destroying factishes? Jagannath was left pondering: When they touched it,

we lost out humanity they and me, didnt we? And we died. Where is the flaw ofit all, in me or in society? There was no answer. After a long walk he came home,feeling dazed.

1 U.R. Anantha Murphy Bharathipura, in 1990, Another India,Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp.98-102.

2 Serres, M. (1987). Statues. Paris, Franois Bourin. He also points out that thehammer is itself a broken piece chipped out of another broken block. Speaking of

Michel AngelosPieta : Les trous dans les mains et les pieds du Christ mort, la plaiebante son flanc, traces de lances ou de clous enfoncs au marteau, diffrent-ils desblessures infliges a marteau sur la face de marbre de la mre de marbre par un foudangereux le dimanche de Pentecte 1972 ou du coup port Mose par lesculpteur lui-mme jetant sur lui marteau et ciseau et lui enjoignant de parler? Ou

des chocs qui le taillrent? (p.203).3

One of the inventors of the word fetishism links it to another etymology:Les Ngres de la cte occidentale dAfrique, et mme ceux de lintrieur des terresjusquen Nubie, contre limitrophe de lEgypte, ont pour objet dadoration certainesDivinits que les Europens appellent ftiches, terme forg par nos commerants du

Sngal, sur le mot PortugaisFetisso (sic), cest dire chose fe, enchante, divine, ourendant des oracles; de la racine latine Fatum, Fanum, Fari. (p.15) in Charles DeBrosses, (1988),Du Culte des dieux ftiches, (1760) new edition Corpus des Oeuvresde Philosophie, Fayard, Paris, but all the dictionaries link it to the portuguses pastpaticiple of fabricated. On the conceptual history of the term, see William Pietz,

Fetischism as Cultural Discourse, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, (1993), AlfonsoIacono, Le ftichisme. Histoire d'un concept, PUF, Paris, (1992). See Schaffer??

4 This is a clich of epistemology. For a recent treatment, see Latour, B. (1996).Do scientific Objects Have a History? Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of LacticAcid. Common Knowledge, 5(1), 76-91. I show in this paper that Pasteur explicitely

articulates the constructivism and the realism in one single theory of fait-faire thatfuses in a completely original solution the two contradictory meanings of fact.This implies, however, to extend historicity to things.

5 I take it to be obvious that science studies has been both the symptom and theinstrument of the demise of the model of the critique by rendering ridiculous the

idea of a social construction. With some disciplinary patriotism, I take thisfelix culpathe failure of providing a social explanation of hard facts as the majorintellectual event of recent years. It has revealed that all the other social

explanations, even on softer facts, were of little import, and symmetrically, it hasrendered unusable the notion of a positivistic causation.


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6 Two examples among hundreds from Rio: Eu fui raspado para Osala emSalvador mas precisei assentar Yewa e me Aninha me mandou para o Rio de

Janeiro porque j na poca Yewa era por assim dizer um Orisa em via de extino.Muitos ja no conheciam mais os oro de Yewa; Eu sou de Oba, Oba quase que

j morreu porque ningum sabe assentar ela, ningum sabe fazer, ento eu vim parac porque aqui eu fui raspada e a gente no vai esquecer os awo para fazer ela,from Patricia de Aquino La construction de la personne dans le Candombl,1995, Muse National, Rio de Janeiro. Candombl adepts no more hide the simplefact that they make, fabricate, sit or produce their gods which is why they are

real than scientists hide the fabrication of their facts.7 As in the scenography promoted by Pierre Bourdieu to its most extreme. The

notion of illusio is used by him to explain how the ventriloquist takes his ownstomach as a foreign voice. But the illusio is entirely in the head and eyes of the

sociologist who believes that the other believes and that, without it, the whole societywill flounder. No king is more naked than the sociologist who believes he is the onlysane mind in the asylum. See especially La dlgation et le ftichisme politique inChoses dites, Minuit, Paris, (1987). p.185-202.

8 Marxist anti-fetishism, by the way, is not that simple to decode because the

human labor which is revealed by the critical thinker as what has been projected bymistake on the merchandise, is not given back to the human individual agent. It isnow redistributed to a very complex set of collective agencies. Thus, the fetish, farfrom being what has been emptied and reversed by marxism becomes one of these

very active factishes that distributes agencies, hides the origin of forces, and

substitutes to the transcendance of idols, another transcendence, that of the generic

and social humanity. Once again, the more antifetichists you add, the more factishesyou find.9 I use human agency to cover the two hidden halves of each of the two words

fact and fetish, but the definition of human, action and agency, is completely

modified through this operation. See the first part of the last section. What isinteresting is that human agency looks very different when applied symmetricallyto facts and to fetishes than when applied to only one of the two halves. Thissymmetrical treatment, once again, is the decisive discovery of science studies, theone that no other domain could make since it implies to attend simultaneously to the

sturdy facts of science and to the furious history of the social.10 Factish is a way to give a firmer model to the symmetric anthropology

began with Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (Catherine Porter,Trans.). Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

11 See a nice case of that reaction in Heinich, N. (1993). Les objets-personnes.

Ftiches, reliques et oeuvres d'art. Sociologie de l'art(6), 25-56.12 See the powerful use of the notion of factish in Stengers, I. (1997).

Cosmopolitiques - Tome 4: mcanique quantique, la fin du rve. Paris: LaDcouverte.

13 Representations, or discourses, or epistemes, or structures are some of the more

polite words used to euphemise beliefs. Structuralism has been so important foranthropologists because it was a polite way to make a rational science out of non-sense, by grouping together, in some legible set up, signifying without signifiers. It

was a science of non-sense, but still a science. Post-structuralism threw into doubtthis equilibrium by applying to the rational enterprise itself the same doubt as for the


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other representations. It manages to produce a non-science of non-sense! Foucaultsknowledge/power slogan marks the dividing line, but he himself never chose whichwas what, balancing his act cleverly between the science that gave him all theadvantage of rationality and the non-sense that provided him with all the privileges

of radical politics. After him, the jugglers were not so clever and they let a few ballsfall on the floor! It fell to them to imagine the ultimate experiment: the non-sense ofnon-sense, that is virtuality.

14 The specificity of the notion of nature that has been produced by thismodernist culture is now well recognized by anthropologists as can be seen through

the remarkable collection of essays assembled by Descola, P., & Palsson, G. (Eds.).(1996). Nature and Society. Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, seein particular the chapter by Descola, P. Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecologyand Social Practice pp. 82-102

15 A large part of the anthropology of the modern would be the anthropology oficonoclasm. See in France the work, in history of art, of Gamboni, D. (1996).The Destruction of Art. Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution.London: Reaktion Books.

16 It can even be shown that the very notion of practice is a consequence of the

modernist division between the purification work on top and the mediation work atbottom. Practice is not silent or without theories, on the contrary it speaks endlesslyand with extraordinarily subtle concepts, and yet, field studies are needed to retrievethis interpreation that is forbidden, abolished, purified away by the top part. This iswhy the methodological slogan follow the actors themselves is so important for the

new anthropology that looks for explicitations not for explanations.17

See Serres, op. cit. chapter 1.18 The pariahs found him more menacing than Bhutharaya! which means thatthe freedom fighter now has on his side the power of two gods instead of one!Pariahs always lose against modernization.

19 Latour, B. (1997). Socrates' and Callicles' Settlement or the Invention of theImpossible Body Politic. Configurations,in press

20 On all of this see the case study of Pasteur op.cit. For a recent beautiful casestudies see Pickering, A. (1995). The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency and Science.Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

21 See the remarkable interpretation of some of the Chinese theories of action inJullien, F. (1995). The Propensity of Things. Toward a History of Efficacy in China.

(translated fropm the French) Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. In hislatest book (1997). Trait de l'efficacit. Paris: Grasset the feat is even moreextraordinary since the Western rational theory of efficiency seems totally magical to

the Chinese!.22 Against the notion of fabrication see my attemps in (1994). On Technical

Mediation. Common Knowledge 3(2): 29-64, and (1996). On Interobjectivity -with

discussion by Marc Berg, Michael Lynch and Yrjo Engelstrm. Mind Culture andActivitu, 3(4), 228-245.. See also a detailed case study in (1996). Aramis or the Loveof Technology. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. The theory oftechnology is crucial for understanding science and hence constructivism and hencesociety.

23 Whitehead, A.N. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, Free Press,New York, (1929 1978): All actual entities share with God this characteristic of self-


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causation. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristicof transcending all other actual entities, including God, p. 223).

24 See the ethnopsychiatric work of Nathan, T. (1994). L'influence qui gurit.Paris, Editions Odile Jacob. Nathan, T. and I. Stengers (1995). Mdecins et sorciers.

Paris, Les Empcheurs de penser en rond. I have done an internship in hisconsultation. This section is very much influenced by this experience of alternating,for a term, between Nathans divinities resurrected in the place of migrant workerspsychology, and the CSI where actor-networks were replacing objects of science andtechnology. Symmetric anthropology is now physically visible in Paris. The question

arises then: what space houses both quasi-subjects and quasi-objects?25 Spiritualism, or worse spiritism are not misallocation of beliefs, as in the

modernist idiom, as if internal representations had been unduly projected ontooutside things. They are mistakes on the specifications of ontologies. So, by rejecting

the fact/fetish dichotomy one does not finds oneself in the proverbial dark nightwhere all cows are grey. Analytical clarity and judgement are possible but on thecondition of knowing how to write down the specifications of all these types ofentities. Differenciation is always the ennemy of demarcation.

26 This scene has been played veru realistically in the exchange betwee Harry

Collins and Steven Yearley on the one hand and Michel Callon and I, on the other;see Pickering, A. (Ed.). (1992). Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press.

27 This is the difference that Tobie Nathan sees between angstin psychonanalysisand fright in ethnopsychiatry. The latter takes very seriously the idea that the

fright indeed has a cause. This is also what the patient says. But then one has to

abandon the idea of a mental state and begin adressing the divinity that is the causeof the fright. This does not mean shifting to spiritism though or irrationality, sincethe divinity does not request the ontological status of a spirit or of a neurone. Samething for the Virgin Mary in the exemplary study carried out by Claverie, E. (1991).

Voir apparatre, regarder voir. Raisons Pratiques(2), 1-19.28 See for instance the work of Cussins, C. (1996). Ontological Choreography :

Agency for Women Patients in an Infertility Clinic, Social Studies of Science pp.29 I take very seriously the American backlash against intellectuals and

especially the recent reaction by a fraction of the scientific establishment against

science studies. One way is of course to fight against such critics, and that should bedone, the other, better suited for this volume, is to accept the critique and to see

what we have failed to do and to understand. If the critical model accepts beinglimited to university campuses, it itself becomes a sect that deserves to be foughtagainst. The intellectual can only expresses what every ordinary persons says, not

fight alone against an ocean of false beliefs.30 To repeat myselfad nauseam the strength of science studies is to apply the same

reasoning to hard facts and to soft beliefs and to realize that it does not hold waterfor any of them. No one before had done it! The list was always biased either withfetishes only or facts only. But, to continue the metaphor, the Felix culpa of science

studies makes the resurrection possible after the sin!31 I am using here the word in Isabelle Stengerss sense op.cit.. It can also be

related to Barbara Herstein-Smith definition of ecologies ??. For the Parliament of

Things political argument, see B. Latour (1995). Moderniser ou cologiser. A larecherche de la septime Cit. Ecologie politique(13): 5-27.


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32 See the fascinating treatment of this belatedness in Beck, U. (1992). RiskSociety. Towards a New Modernity. London, Sage, and (1995). Ecological Politicsin the Age of Risk. Cambridge, Polity Press.

33 Chevelu in French has a nice set of connotation that hairy or dishevelled

does not have. Deleuzes rhyzomes could be a good metaphor. This is also what isknown by economists under the name of externalities. Positive and negativeexternalities add to any object, contract and closure a rich network of unexpectedconsequences. Cite callon$$

34 The whole of the new history of science can be read as this after-thought, after

the fact. By reconnecting the social order, the moral order and the natural andtechnical order, the historians of science are doing exactly what everyone of theirNewton, Laplace, Pasteur, Kelvin or Edison was explicitely and reflexively doing except that they were also doing the opposite: pure science as far away as possible

from politics.35 This is what worries most the pariahs woman Viramma interviewed in the

magnificent book she wrote with two French ethnographers Viramma, J. Racine, etJ. Racine (1995). Une vie paria. Le rire des asservis. Inde du Sud. Paris, Plon-Terrehumaine.

36 See Koerner, J. L. (199-). The Image in Quotations: Cranach's Portraits ofLuther Preaching. Shop Talk. Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive: 143-146 and his

present work on Lutheran theology of aesthetics.37 See the fascinating Halbertal, M. and A. Margalit (1992). Idolatry.

Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. Botero, the French specialist ofBabylonian thought, prefers the word enotheism.

38

Mondzain, M.-J. (1996). Image, icne, conomie. Les sources byzantines del'imaginaire contemporain. Paris: Le Seuil.39 See the beautiful Ezrahi, Y. (1990). The Descent of Icarus, Science and the

Transformation of Contemporary Democracy. Cambridge Mass, HarvardUniversity Press.

40 Nor facts with beliefs, as in the cartoon-like attempts of social-constructivists!41 See the fascinating account on the cremation of widows by Weinberger-

Thomas, C. (1996). Cendres d'immortalit. La crmation des veuves en Inde. Paris:Le Seuil.

68 factishes jerusalem 2 96 gb

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